Dream Gates

In my night dreams, the place of creation is often a kitchen. I don’t do a lot of cooking, but I love the image of the kitchen — where we are fed and nourished and we mix things together and cook things up — as the creative center.

I especially like to think of the creative process as being similar to baking. You get together your startup dough, then you knead it — you stretch it and pull it apart and bring it together again. Then you stand back and let it rise (if it will). Then you get hot, and expose your project to the fire. And finally comes the test: how does it taste?

Advertisement

I know, from the state of my dream kitchen, how a creative project is coming (or not coming) along. Once, when working on a book, I dreamed that a splendid meal was being delivered, but that there was no place in the kitchen to set it down, since every surface was covered with papers or dishes. The dream gave me a clear message to eliminate clutter, push aside old drafts and research files, and make space for the main dish to be served up fresh and hot.

The state of the dream kitchen may reflect the family situation. A woman once came to me with a troubling dream in which her kitchen was so messy that she could not tell the difference between the groceries and the trash. She insisted that she was a tidy person who would never allow her kitchen to get into that state. Could the dream be played out in the future? She was reluctant to accept that idea. We briefly discussed whether the mess in the kitchen could be a metaphor for the state of her marriage and family relations. She allowed that there might be some “cleaning up” to do on that front. Two weeks later, she came home to find that the mess from her dream had spilled over into her literal kitchen. Her husband and teen boys had done such a number on the kitchen that she literally could not tell the difference between the groceries and the trash. This prompted her to have a tough sit-down conversation with her husband, at the end of which they agreed that the mess in their relationship couldn’t be cleaned up by anything less than a separation.

In that kitchen dream, be it noted, we see how a quite literal precognitive dream can point us to a situation in ordinary life that is richly symbolic. We need to take dreams more literally, and waking life more symbolically.

The greatest crisis in our lives is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck and set ourselves up for failure because we buy into a limited or self-defeating version of reality, and refuse to see our situation differently.

The answer lies within us, in the power of imagination. We are ruled by images; they are the “facts of the mind” (as the poet Coleridge called them) that turn us on and turn us off and program our bodies for wellness or disease. To live richer and more creative lives, we want to learn to choose the images to which we give energy and belief. We can do this by learning and harnessing the seven open secrets of imagination:

Advertisement

If we can picture our blocks, we can move beyond them

Mandy was terrified of speaking in public, even in front of two or three people. I asked her if she could feel what was blocking her. She could; it felt like a choke collar. I asked if she could see that collar. She saw it as antique lace of the kind her grandmother used to wear. Once she had that image, she was able to work successfully to release herself from the choke-hold of a family tradition that held that it is the role of women to suffer in silence. When she found an image of her block, Mandy moved beyond it and claimed her voice.

The body believes in images and they can help it to heal and stay well

An image sends electrical sparks through your whole body. This shows up when brainwaves are recorded by an EEG. At the same time, an image sends a stream of chemicals washing through you. If you dwell on images of grief and failure, you are manufacturing “downers”. If you can shift your mind to a relaxing scene you produce a natural tranquilizer. In its internal workings, the body does not seem to distinguish between a strong image and a physical event. There is immense potential for healing here – as is increasingly recognized in the healthcare community, if we choose to give our focus to positive images that are right for us. Where do we get those images? From happy life memories, and from our dreams, which are a great factory of customized imagery for self-healing.

Advertisement

If you can see your destination, you are better than halfway there

We want to practice seeing and sensing ourselves enjoying the fulfillment of our heart’s desires, in our dream home, or our dream job, or with our dream partner or community. If we can grow a vision strongly enough in our inner senses – and if it is guided by the heart and the gut and not merely the head – then that vision has traction. It helps to pull us towards our destination.

The Big Story is hunting us

The Big story – the one that can give us the courage to get through whatever life throws at us – is hunting us. It makes itself known in dreams and through the play of coincidence. We allow it to find us by making a date, preferably seven days a week, with the most important book we’ll ever own: our personal journal.Writing a journal is taking a walk in the bush. The longer you write, the further you get away from safe places and much-traveled roads. You’re now in the wild. And you’re in that state of alert relaxation that is going to encourage something large and powerful that lives in the wild to leap at you from hiding and claim you.

Advertisement

There is a place of imagination, and it is entirely real

For each of us, there is a place of imagination – maybe many places – that are altogether real. One of these, for me, is a magical library of which I never tire. Any book in this library opens another world, and master teachers are accessible here. Spend a few minutes, any day you can, building your own home in the imagination – a place where you can rest and relax and get creative ideas or receive healing or have fun with your favorite people. You’ll find this wonderfully restorative. You may also find that the stronger you build your dream place in your mind, the greater the chance that it will manifest in the world.

Advertisement

We can transfer a vision to someone in need of a vision

We have the ability to grow a vision for someone who needs a vision. After her hysterectomy, Dawn told me she felt “gutted.” I helped her to picture herself inside the blackened, hollowed-out core of an immense Californiaredwood that had survived a forest fire. Despite the gutting, the great tree was vigorously alive, hurling its green spray towards the sky. Dawn made the redwood image part of her daily meditation, and it took on spontaneous life. She entered the blackened core one day to find it had become the nest of the phoenix, and felt herself rise, on shining wings, from the ashes of her pain and loss.

Advertisement

7. The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results

I have borrowed the words from the poet Rabindranath Tagore. To live the fullest and juiciest life, we need to develop poetic consciousness.

Imagine that you can make yourself incredibly small and travel inside the body and repair its cells structure and balance its flows from within.

Imagine you can travel across time and visit a younger self and provide the counsel and mentorship that younger self needed in a time of ordeal.

Imagine you can communicate with your self on a higher level, and get a wiser perspective on all your issues – and return with a road map that will get you where you need to go.

Imagine that you can reduce pain with your mind, and can develop this ability to the point where you can dispense with meds even when undergoing root canal work.

Advertisement

Imagine you can go to a place where you can review your soul’s contract – the set of lessons and tasks you may have agreed to undertake before you came into your present life experience – so you can now remember and complete your true life mission.

Imagine a workplace that is no longer toxic or stressed out because people make space every morning to share dreams and check whether an innovative solution or a fun idea has come to someone in the night.

I have seen all these things accomplished, through the power of imagination.

What we can imagine has a tendency to become real in our bodies and our world. Once again: “The stronger the imagination, the less imaginary the results.”

From a thousand years ago, in a slim autobiographical novel gusting with moonlight and desire, we have a dozen dreams of an anonymous Japanese woman who was born in Kyoto in 1008. The book itself is untitled; sometimes it is called the Sarashina Nikki (literally, “The Day-Record of Sarashina”). The translator of the Penguin edition, Ivan Morris, decided to import a title from an even older work, a poem titled, “As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams.”

Advertisement

The author, whose name is unknown, belonged to a remarkable group of Japanese women writers of the tenth and eleventh centuries. We know almost nothing of their lives, not even their names. A modern editor suggests that their extraordinary accomplishments “produced an unconscious resentment among male scholars, with the result that these talented ladies were permanently condemned to anonymity.” One of them was this author’s aunt, who wrote a searing tale of jealousy, Kagero Nikki (“Gossamer Years”).

By convention, the anonymous author of Bridge of Dreams is called Lady Sarashina, a name borrowed from a mountainous area she probably never visited. The daughter of a minor provincial governor who resented being posted outside the capital, she led a secluded life, mostly behind garden walls inKyoto, until she became a lady-in-waiting to a princess at thirty-one. Her court connection may have helped her to marry at thirty-six, very late in her day; she had children. Her prose style was lovely; the poems that punctuate her recollections (an epistolary mode of the time) are mostly forgettable.

Advertisement

She told no one her dreams, and failed to take actions suggested by the early dreams in the series. She later regrets failing to act on her dreams, realizing that they could have steered her life on a better course.

She loved stories and romances, and the first dreams she records – one features a “handsome priest” – came in the midst of her binge reading of women’s writing like the Tales of Genji. Some dreams were experienced at temples, to which she journeyed on pilgrimages that were sometimes cherry-blossom tours, sometimes belated efforts to honor dream directions. Japanese classical scholar Ikeda Kikan says: “The author of Sarashina Nikki can be regarded as the first person in Japanese literature to have discovered dreams…Her dreams are not fortuitous interludes but are consciously grasped as having a definite, inevitable meaning.” This is the first Japanese book in which dreams play a central role. Life itself has the quality of dream, a flimsy bridge between different shores.

Her book resembles the modern Japanese genre known as the sh-shosetsu, the “I-novel”, in which the author weaves facts of his life together with imagination.

Why the day of Saint Valentine is associated with romantic love is a mystery. A couple of sainted Valentines, both martyred, are known to the early church but what little is known of them has nothing to do with romance. They are so obscure that the feast of St.Valentine was removed from the General Roman Calendar in 1969. The church that sustains it is the Grand Archdiocese of Florists, Chocolatiers and Greetings Card Makers.

Advertisement

Chaucer is credited with making the first literary association between Valentine’s Day and romantic love in a verse he wrote (in Parliament of the Foules) in 1382, to celebrate the marriage of King Richard II to Anne of Bohemia.

For this was on seynt Volantynys dayWhan euery bryd comyth there to chese his make.

“For this was on Saint Valentine’s Day
when every bird comes there to choose his mate.”

So perhaps we can thank Chaucer for the lovebirds.

A generation later, the poet-prince Charles d’Orléans (in whose name Joan of Arc went to war) wrote the first recognized Valentine greeting. This appears in a sad and strange rondeau addressed to his wife from the Tower of London, where he was being held by the English after his capture at the Battle of Agincourt. The Duke’s poem begins:

“I am already worn out with love
my very sweet Valentine
since for me you were born too late
and for you I was born too soon”

Whatever our current relations with partners, lovers and family, we probably all know someone who deserves a Valentine’s kiss or a hug, oArt:r even a few rhyming couplets. This is also a very good time to think about how dreams can lead us into loving relationships, or out of those that have gone cold and dead.

A chapter in my memoir The Boy Who Died and Came Back is devoted to my dream archaeology expeditions into life and times of Charles d’Orleans and Joan of Arc (who went to war in his name). These began when I rose from sleep with just one mysterious word of medieval French that proved to be a key to trans-temporal discoveries and adventures.

In the dream kitchenIn my night dreams, the place of creation is often a kitchen. I don’t do a lot of cooking, but I love the image of the kitchen — where we are fed and nourished and we mix things together and cook things up — as the creative center.
I especially like to think of the creative process as being

Seven Open Secrets of ImaginationThe greatest crisis in our lives is a crisis of imagination. We get stuck and set ourselves up for failure because we buy into a limited or self-defeating version of reality, and refuse to see our situation differently.
The answer lies within us, in the power of imagination. We are ruled by image

The first Valentine, from the captive princeWhy the day of Saint Valentine is associated with romantic love is a mystery. A couple of sainted Valentines, both martyred, are known to the early church but what little is known of them has nothing to do with romance. They are so obscure that the feast of St.Valentine was removed from the General

The best way to understand a dreamThe best way to grasp the meaning of a dream, and to determine what action the dream requires, is to go back inside the dream and recover more of the story. We should never confuse a dream report - what we remember and can say about a dream - with the full experience of the dream itself. Even a very

Check Out Robert’s Newest Book!

About the Author

Robert Moss
Robert Moss is a world-renowned dream explorer, the creator of Active Dreaming, an original method of dreamwork and healing, and the author of nine books on dreaming, shamanism, and the imagination.» Posts by Robert Moss